Controlling Our Destiny: Building When Open-Source Is No Longer Open-Source

The dev world was on fire this weekend, as news of yet another major open-source project was revealed to be in the midst of an identity crisis. The unsettling trend is clear: hit a certain adoption threshold, and then swap the licensing in an attempt to turn dedicated fans into revenue streams. With more companies searching for a sustainable business model and attempting to appease shareholders, the only certainty we have is, what was free yesterday, might be paid tomorrow.

Case in point: last Friday, Hashicorp made an announcement that sent ripples through developer spaces and cloud-based organizations alike: overnight, they swapped their open-source license to the “Business Source License”, or “BUSL”. In short, the code remains available, and users are granted "the right to copy, modify, create derivative works, redistribute, and make non-production use.". It’s the “non-production use” part of that clause that is causing controversy.

If you’re using one of their tools in a business environment, such as Terraform, you now have to scramble and verify you’re within the terms of the “additional use grant”. If you’re one of the unlucky ones offering Terraform or other Hashicorp code as a part of your product, it seems you may be on the hook for a license now - an unexpected and perhaps business-damaging cost for something that before, had a reasonable expectation wouldn’t be a major expense. Due to the somewhat ambiguous nature of what constitutes a “production” use, many open-source projects and non-profit businesses alike are scrambling to understand if they’ll be caught in HashiCorp’s crosshairs.

That’s what makes this a particularly questionable move. There’s nothing wrong with seeking profit for the products you build. However, it becomes an issue when you pull the rug out from everyone, and misrepresent your product in what can reasonably be seen as a bait-and-switch on the people who made your business what it is today. With such extraordinary fundraising (hundreds of millions over 7 rounds and an IPO), it seems HashiCorp is now obligated to deliver to its investors, and their customers and users are the ones to suffer.

Even if you aren’t directly affected by the changes to these licenses, it highlights an important aspect of incorporating open-source software into your business: there is no guarantee that it will remain free, or that it will remain available. That’s the catch with all the “free” software in circulation today, especially if it is backed by a major corporation. HashiCorp isn’t alone in doing this, and even explicitly calls out several other businesses in their blog who have swapped licenses, as a sort of justification to why it is okay. When it comes down to it, the only open-source software you can trust is the software you write. And maybe Linux.

That said, there is nothing wrong with using open-source software. It has enabled many incredible things to be built, and is the foundation for a lot of human progress. On a conceptual level, sharing and building off each other’s work is the core of human scientific progress. What is important, however, is to be extremely careful about where and how it is used, and when writing open-source software, be honest about your intentions.

Over the last 8 years, we’ve built Cycle with the concept of the “vertically integrated stack”. Though it has sometimes taken us longer, we have preferred to build the vast majority of Cycle in-house: our container orchestrator, our job system, and our infrastructure provisioning software, just to name a few. It wasn’t easy, and we were criticized early on for not just using “off the shelf” solutions to build our platform. Had we done that, Cycle likely would have failed as so many other wrappers around Docker and Kubernetes have. At one point during a demo of the platform, someone asked why we didn’t incorporate Terraform into Cycle, and that it was weird to not use something “the entire industry was using”.

It seems today, more than ever, we have been vindicated in that decision.

When a business or organization decides to use our platform, they are often making a significant decision for the future of their product, and that is not lost on us. In this industry, trust is everything. The trend of many open-source projects backed by a corporation changing their license after they’ve hit critical mass, and leaving their user base that got them to where they are in jeopardy, should be a cause for significant concern. We’ve invested a huge amount of time, thought, and energy into making Cycle’s business model transparent, and alleviating any concerns our customers have. Owning your own infrastructure, grandfathering pricing, and providing a stellar customer experience are just some of the ways we accomplish this. That dedication is why our customer churn rate is incredibly low, and satisfaction is incredibly high.

As Cycle continues to grow, our customers can rest assured that we will continue to be upfront and honest about our business and our platform. I encourage everyone to carefully consider the third-party software they incorporate into their business, and only work with those that you trust.

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